March 24th, 2014 — Squeak Board Meeting Minutes

All members were present.  With so much going on in the community recently, we had a lively discussion in the board meeting today.  This was a make-up meeting due to an untimely outage with Google Hangouts during our normal meeting time last week.

Thank you, Ken Causey!

On March 10th, Ken officially announced his retirement as leader of the box-admins team.  Ken had been warning us for some time that he was winding down his involvement.  There is not a soul in the community who will not miss his professional-level service as our server admin.  Thank you Ken, for a job well-done.

Check out PathView

Recently Michael Perscheid announced PathView, a new IDE tools collection.  While it didn’t generate much discussion on the mailing list yet, it is very much worth having a look.  There were definite, good first-impressions about PathView expressed by the board members.

New Release 4.5 and a new squeak.org Website

The release of Squeak 4.5 coincides with a new draft-release of a new squeak.org website, led by Chris Cunnington.  Altitude is the newest web-framework under development for Squeak.  Redoing the squeak.org with Altitude lets us change up the years-old look of the old site while allowing us to exercise and grow into Altitude.

The reception to the new site has been positive.  Chris C. has responded to several change requests.  Naturally, all in the community care about Squeak’s web-presence, but updates desired by the community should not be the burden of a single individual.  The next steps are to discover what role(s) and webteam-level access permissions are needed to enable community-level participation in the new site.

Squeak 5!

There was consensus that we would like Squeak release cycles to be a bit shorter 🙂 — preferably every six months.  Eliot believes Spur, and the associated image-format changes needed to support it, will be ready well in time for the next release, which will be called Squeak 5 on account of the image-format change.  Craig’s Spoon / Naiad work might be put in as Squeak 6, then.

7/15/2013 — Meeting Minutes

Squeak board minutes 15 July 2013

present: Eliot Miranda, Chris Muller, Frank Shearar, Tim Rowledge

The annual summertime quiet-period has struck again.

4.5 is planned for release Q4/2013.  This is a rich release with the Environments feature and significant package factorings.

Colin is in process of moving to another hemisphere, so he may not be able to respond immediately to questions about Environments.

Meanwhile, Frank continues modularisation of the image.

Eliot is back from vacation and just released new Cog VM’s.

Eliot and Craig had met at one point to discuss integration of Spoon VM changes into Cog.  Additional work is needed.

6/3/2013 — Meeting Minutes

Squeak board minutes 3 June 2013

present: Bert Freudenberg, Eliot Miranda, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Tim Rowledge

– We had a discussion about the Swiki.  We would like to have a rich and useful wiki for the community, but there is no way around having to do some work to achieve that.  Thankfully there appear to be some easy opportunities for cleaning.  A plan was discussed:

   1) get access to the swiki image so the code and features can be improved.

   2) is the Swiki software installable and testable on 4.5?

   3) some easy cleanups seem obvious:  remove empty & clearly obsolete pages.

   4) develop guidelines about what content is needed.

   5) ask other folks to help review and clean per guidelines.

– There was a discussion about the vision and future of Squeak.  Squeak evolves naturally by the participation of community members pushing their desired features into the image.  To the extent they are acceptable to the rest of the community ensures a sufficient element of stability that allows the community to remain up-to-date and cohesive.  Meanwhile the platform continually becomes a better and better Squeak.

– Some improvements come from individuals and some are purposefully discussed and acted on as a community.  Members of the board have some ideas about this and also invite others to open discussions about this on the mailing list.  As an example, there was a recent discussion about graphical backends to support anti-aliased output.

minutes 2013-03-04

Squeak board minutes 4 March 2013

present: all (Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Eliot Miranda, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Tim Rowledge, Frank Shearar)

closed items:

+ Eliot and Colin met up in person last week, discussed technical stuff: building from core image, environments, file system, atomic reshape/reorg, fast reshape, parcel format, “quasi-quotes”. We discussed the quasi-quotes proposal, agreed that it’s worth trying out (e.g., for making HTML-generation code more readable). Eliot will continue to seek feedback from others with similar projects, e.g., Helvetia.

+ Chris Cunnington has agreed to take over as webteam leader.

+ Scheduled future open community meetings, on the no-board-meeting Mondays. Lots of things we could do together with that time, like occasional tutorials (e.g., quasi-quotes, Spoon). Craig tried out the Hangouts On Air feature of YouTube. It records Google Hangout sessions and makes them available quickly on YouTube. It seems to work, and could be useful for recording the community meetings. Interested folks could edit the sessions into something more concise for a mass audience. The next community meeting event is posted on a public Google Calendar, available via HTML and iCal. 

+ Now that we all have Immersive Terf accounts, we’ll try that for the next board meeting. This is an OpenQwaq instance hosted by 3DICC.

open items:

– discussion of Spoon by Frank and Craig

– updates to the Teams and Board pages on the Squeak website.

– voter list publication (Bert, Ron)

– Squeak badges and GSOC funds

– new SqueakSource server

– GSOC 2013 initiatives

minutes 2013-02-18

Squeak board minutes 2013-02-18

first meeting of term, all incoming and outgoing members invited.

present: Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Tim Rowledge, Frank Shearer (all incoming, Tim and Frank are new)

absent: Chris Cunnington, Eliot Miranda, Randal Schwartz, Levente Uzonyi (Eliot is new, others are outgoing. Chris, Randal, and Levente mentioned they couldn’t make it, Eliot was on holiday)

closed items:

+ Decided to keep using Google Hangouts for now, although the group is willing to try Immersive Terf once, to see if its Mac audio support has improved.

+ Moved future meetings to 1st and 3rd Mondays at 7pm Amsterdam time (old schedule was 1st and 3rd Mondays at noon Los Angeles time). Frank set up a shared Google Calendar.

+ Bert updated the new-board-member info package.

+ Craig added new members to the board mailing list, Bert invited new members to edit the WordPress blog.

open items:

– Agreed we’d like to make the voter list public, allowing for individuals to opt out. It’s part of an effort to get voters to declare their connection with the project. Also, some of us are just curious who the voters are. Bert will ping the community and Ron Teitelbaum about this.

– Money. SFC is paying the Hetzner hosting bill on our behalf with the money they hold for us. Discussion of Squeak badges. Tim wonders about prior distribution numbers. Craig has the remainder, will count them. Bert pinged Giovanni about GSOC 2007 funds transfer.

– The webteam. Chris Cunnington said previously Janko has no time for this anymore, Colin had no luck reaching Janko. Colin suggests Chris Cunnington as new leader, will contact him. Colin will also ask Chris C. the status of the new website.

– SqueakSource. We’d like to replicate Berne’s SqueakSource server. We want to at least preserve the projects that are there now, and we would take control of the squeaksource.com domain name. Bert will continue to coordinate communication. Chris will review and debug the squeaksource code, and consider adding a Magma backend. Berne contacts: Oscar Nierstrasz and Fabrizio Perin.

– Google Summer of Code 2013. We’d like get some more Squeak projects started/accepted. Would Eliot like more people working on the project he proposed last year?

Squeak Board minutes – 12/17/12

Members attending: Bert Freudenberg, Colin Putney, Chris Muller, Randal Schwartz, Chris Cunnington, Levente Uzonyi

– Colin and Chris Muller volunteered to be the release managers for Squeak 4.5

– we explored how the Jenkins server could send an email to Squeak-dev  when a recent update to the Trunk breaks a test.

– moving services from the current server, box2, to the two new boxes, box3 and box4, is under way

– we are talking to the managers of squeaksource.com about how to provide facilities to help people move projects to SqueakSource3.

– There is agreement that having “officially supported” packages outside the image is something everyone wants.  The new CI infrastructure could run automated tests even for these packages.

Squeak Board minutes – 10/15/2012

Present: Craig Latta, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Levente Uzonyi

– There are plans to replace squeak.org with a new site based on Colins Altitude web-framework.  The SFC has suggested including a flattr contribution on member-project web-sites, which will be considered for the new site.

– A continuation of last Saturday’s Squeak hangout discussion occurred where Tim Rowledge presented a discussion about transparent access to native OS processes from within the image.

– Meanwhile, Craig is planning his next release of Spoon, which is becoming ready for mainstream consumption.  This project will be very exciting for Squeak as it promises to help address many long-time concerns of the community such as modularity, distribution and scale.

– 4.4 is planned for release this month while energy is building for 4.5.  Colin wants full Environments in 4.5, as well as adoption of his FileSystem framework.  Chris wants Themes so the look of the system can be more easily customized and also inclusion (or easy loadability) of the latest Refactoring Engine.  We also want to finally begin purging long-deprecated code.

– While there is a lot of work to be done, a general feeling of satisfaction with Squeak’s status, capability and future potential was expressed.

Squeak Board minutes – 10/1/12

All members were present: Chris Cunnington, Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Randal Schwartz, Levente Uzonyi

– The next Squeak Community Meeting is on 13 October. Find a web cam and join us in a fun Google Hangout! [1]

– We are happy to see the work on Squeak 4.4 being in the home stretch now, looking forward to the release

– Ideas are collecting for Squeak 4.5, such as including a full Environments implementation and removing deprecated code.

– Traits were discussed. We would like to know about Squeak projects that use Traits for development, or about other packages that use Traits.

– Squeak took possession of a new Virtual Server from Gandi.net [2] provided courtesy of our legal home, the Software Freedom Conservancy [3]. The existing Jenkins server [4] will be moved over to the new location and expanded to manage more jobs. Those jobs will not just be for running tests on the trunk image, but for virtual machine compilation. It is to be hoped that having a working start-to-finish build script that anybody can run will help to document the process and make it more accessible to all Squeakers.

– The Softlayer server is still waiting on approval from its legal department and is expected to arrive in the near future

– We briefly touched the subject of marketing/promoting Squeak to the wider world. One idea is to create greater visibility for the projects members of the community are working on, which is one of the objectives of the Squeak Community Meetings on G+. Since we ran out of time we will return to this topic at our next meeting.

[1] https://plus.google.com/events/c0nfhlfod6ogn3aumsq6seda7g8

[2] http://www.gandi.net/

[3] http://www.sfconservancy.org/

[4] http://squeakci.org/

Meeting Report for April 19, 2011

This was a transition meeting with the brief presence of Andreas and Craig, and the participation of Juan. The new board thanked the departing members for their work.

The new board was fully present: Bert, Chris (Muller), Chris (Cunnington), Colin, Jecel, Levente and Randal. Randal explained his progress with backing up the Squeak sites and several hosting options were discussed. The “welcome” packet written by Andreas last year was read and updated.

Meeting Report for March 1, 2011

Bert, Craig, Jecel and Randal were present at this week’s Squeak board meeting.

Brad from the SFC reported that the funds ESUG had been generously holding for the Squeak project have now been transferred to the SFC account. Craig has done the same with the amount he had been holding. This puts Squeak in a far better position to spend on servers and other needed resources.

Since Squeak has found a legal home as a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, it can now receive your donations, too. Paypal and Google donation buttons will be added soon to the squeak.org site.

The Squeak Oversight Board election process is a little late this year. There was some discussion about how to move it forward. Last year we discussed to have a membership model for Squeak. Only registered members would be able to vote in that case, which might be more representative of the current Squeak user base than the informal email list we have been keeping so far. If you are interested in helping organize the elections, please join the elections team mailing list.

Merik Voswinkel and Lawson English proposed to host a mirror for SqueakSource (and, in the future, for other Squeak-related sites). This proposal was well received, having backups is important. SqueakSource is generously hosted by the University of Bern.

The Pharo Board sent an email to the squeak-dev list today, announcing plans to build a legal infrastructure. The Squeak Oversight Board supports the Pharo initiative to create a “User and Industrial Partners Consortium”. We share the goal of continuous improvement in the common base of all Squeak-derived systems.